The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
Satellite television is increasing in popularity due to the ever-increasing amount of programming as well as the quality of programming. Programming includes standard national (CONUS) broadcasts, local or regional station broadcasts, on-demand content and interactive content.
While providing a large amount of content to consumers is desirable, it is also desirable to allow the consumers to easily find programming to view. Currently, a program guide provides a graphical representation of the content or program events available to a user. A program guide is typically a list of programs, times, and channels for the various content. Only a limited amount of guide material may be displayed on the screen at one time. Thus, the program guide, while useful, becomes a slow way of finding desirable content in a large amount of available content.
Searching by key words is another method for providing content results to users. However, because of the volume of materials set top boxes may have significant time associated with a search. Searching takes place by sorting through all the available content entries. This can take a significant amount of time.
Key word searching can also result in numerous extra program results. When searching for a live DETROIT TIGERS game using key words, for example, not only will a live event appear in the results but the pre-game and post-game shows, replays of games and the like will also appear. Most often the live games are of interest.
Oftentimes, users are concerned with a particular league, division or sub-division of a league. Further searching for all games within a category using key word is typically not accurate. For example, searching for all BIG TEN games in the EAST Division would result in little or no results because program names are not categorized in that way.
The processing resources within a set top box are also somewhat limited. Therefore, providing a search that generates results more quickly and accurately is desirable.